In the first case, full disclosure means that everyone will know it, which will allow all the black hats to exploit the public with it before the company has a chance to fix it and deploy (or at least try) the fix.
BZZZZT! WRONG!
The only people going to be exploited in this case are the people who CONTINUE TO USE THE SERVICE DESPITE PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE THAT IT IS INSECURE.
Imagine there's a server out there with all your financial infomation on it. If someone gets access to it you'll be ruined. Do you really want to just *hope* that no one takes advantage of the vunerability, OR would you rather they just unplug that box until the fix is ready in 24 hours.
Full disclosure puts the pressure where it belongs (better fix it before I switch to a different platform) and allows users to make an informed decision about what software to use.
I think that the time for sender-postage-paid email has come. It's the only solution that has any significant chance of really killing SPAM.
Yeah, 'cause nobody ever gets junk snail mail!
This idea's been around for a long time and it's just silly. If someone has to jump through hoops to send me email, I would rather they do something sensible, like get their public key signed by someone I trust rather than just proving the have access to five cents.
There are other major problems as well. Like what is I want to send out an anonymous email containing evidence of Ashcroft himself torturing "terror suspects". It's REALLY easy to trace money and the evidence is kept around for a long time.
You're just demonstrating your complete ignorance of US Patent law here. Patents are regularly challenged in a court of law and before a judge with the input of expert witnesses.
You're just demonstrating your lack of reading comprenhension.
Obviously patents get challenged in court.
My point is that patents are considered valid until they are challenged in court and thrown out.
They often lose. People prosecuting a patent that would not withstand this level of scrutiny typically drop their requests for royalties when push comes to shove
Of course, you need something more substantive, my loud friend
How about this:
WE'RE NOT IN A COURT ROOM. I'M BITCHING ON THE INTERNET ABOUT THE FLAWS IN THE SYSTEM ITSELF, NOT SUGGESTING WAYS TO WORK WITHIN THE FLAWED SYSTEM.
How about this, try repling to the points I actually made instead of bragging about being an "expert" witness. The point is that the people wanting to place a restraint on everyone else in the country should have to be the ones paying your fee, not the people who want to continue to do what they were doing before some jerk patented an obvious idea.
...and as I said before, the shit is freakin obvious. The problem here isn't prior art, because you shouldn't have to search for prior art, you should be able to recognize that this is a trivial merger of two already existing technologies. Even if there was no prior art directly implementing the claims of the patent, it should have been immediately thrown out.
Turning off the car will lock the steering, and then you'll really be screwed. Instead, just shift to neutral and let the thing bounce off the rev limiter until you're stopped.
This is why you don't turn the iginition all the way off, you leave it in "accessory".
Not every car has a rev limiter, but I have yet to see a car where you can't turn the ignition off without locking the wheel.
Well, if not lock the steering, it'll at least turn off the power steering pump -- and the hydraulic brakes, for that matter
First off, the HYDRAULIC portion of the brakes will still work. You probably mean the vacuum assist. Second, both the power steering and power braking should continue to work to some degree so long as your engine continues to rotate at a moderate speed. (Don't put it in neutral.)
AMD has always had more bugs, and some for more serious then the intel one that sparked enough consumer backlash (out of panic) to have a recall.
I have a hard time believing this is true.
I might believe that AMD usually has more bugs, or has more bugs cumulatively, but the number of bugs, being a RANDOM varible, is quite unlikely to be so well behaved that the number of Intel bugs has NEVER exceeded the number of AMD bugs. I would like to see a source for your statement.
Most patented material is at least somewhat obvious to a specialist in the field, particularly after the fact. That's why people patent things in the first place.
The reason patents were created is to protect investments made in groundbreaking R&D.
The criterion according to the USPTO
The USPTO is worthless. They are simply a registry of "I claim to have invented this on this date."
The problem is that they claim to adequately research patent applications, and therefore those that are accepted are presumed to be valid.
It is retarded to believe that a single gov't agency understands every technology on the planet well enough to decide if a patent is novel.
Patents should be changed so that, like copyright, the evidence is argued in a court of law with expert witnesses. The presumption that an orgainzation that refers to patent applicants as its "customers" and time and time again approves nonsense patents (with no consequences to itself) is qualified to decide what is a valid patent is nonsense.
Perhaps its more the case that a couple of dot com kiddies are trying ride the actual technological advances made half a decade earlier.
Perhaps it's more the case that this shit is freakin obvious.
If your idea is taking something that was already invented and adding the word "wireless" in front of it, that's not any significant innovation. People who file patents like this should go to jail for fraud. It's absuing the system, plain and simple.
Oh, sure. Pharmaceutic companies would continue to invest eight-, nine-, and even ten-figure sums into developing a drug knowing that, once developed, any competitor could produce and sell exactly the same thing without having invested the GNP of Albania in developing it.
This argument seems to be a repeated theme. It's important to remember that:
Corporations do not have the best interest of the human race in mind.
There are other ways society can fund medical research.
Money isn't the only motivation for developing a cure for cancer.
Imagaine a hypothetical company that makes AIDS treatment drugs. They're raking it in with no end in sight. Suddenly, one of their top scientists develops a cure for AIDS. It was a one in a million shot, and they're pretty sure no one else is going to come up with it. They do the math and they figure out that they can make more money by treating the disease than by curing it, so they burn all they research and remind everyone of their sacred NDA's.
This is just one example of how our current system is completely fucked. It simply does not put the costs and benefits in the proper places.
It only takes the tiniest amount of study to understand that, without patents, the pharmaceutic industry would cease to exist.
It takes only the tiniest amount of common sense to realize that without patents, medical research itself would still exist, just like it was around before patents existed. (Your argument that the industry would cease to exist is also fallacious. Look at all the drugs you can buy that AREN'T covered by patents.)
Bad move. Claiming that wine tasting is 100% snake oil, makes it pretty easily to DISPROVE your claim. So long as enough "wine snobs" agree on even the most basic question, then you are proven wrong. Personally, I'm pretty sure I can tell the difference between Port and Sherry and I suspect that I'm far from alone:)
Some could then go on to become "ultra fine food" snobs...which the rest of us can laugh at...just like any of us do with "wine snobs"....please don't tell me you smell the cork...
One has to wonder what it is you have against those of us who like wine. I hate to break it to you but there ARE good wines and bad wines, good movies and bad movies, good coffee and bad coffee, etc. People typically don't agree on their favorites, as their tastes are somewhat different, but most people would rather have fresh-ground coffee than Folger's crystals.
Your opinions seem to reflect those of someone with a lot of preconceived notions about people who drink wine, but little knowedge on the subject of wine itself. Personally, I only like certain types of wines, but I'm not crass enough to imply that people who like other types (or don't like wine at all) are idiots.
Honestly, the whole wine tasting industry is mostly snake oil anyway. I can't find the link, but sone researchers did a "pepsi challenge" type of test with a group of experienced wine tasters. The result? No two wine tasters reported the same taste, body, or whatever from the same wines. Their repsonses were, in fact, wildly dissimilar.
This doesn't mean it's snake oil, it means that different people have different tastes.
Consider an analogy to movies. Not every review gives every movie that same rating, but that certainly doesn't mean there aren't movies that are considered great by the vast majority and those that are considered terrible.
I took wines in college and we did a really interesting test during one of the first lectures: we passed around glasses of sugar water of varying concentrations, went through them in order of concentration, and had members of the class raise their hand once they got to a concentration they considered "sweet". The range between the high and low end was very suprising.
Just like movies, you should find a reviewer who's tastes align with yours.
Bring back the good old days, when wine had the same social status as lager, thats what I say!
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. As far as I see table wine has the same status as your typical beer. Fine wines though, are just that. They cost more to make and are much more rare than a can of Bud. They will ALWAYS have higher social status because of this.
That's a crazy idea. Here's a fact that will MAKE you crazy: neither the latest versions of IE nor Firefox render valid code correctly.
Nobody's perfect, sure.
This is why I say to limit the functions you use.
There are always going to be some functions that aren't supported properly in the various mainstream browsers.
I'm not suggesting this is easy, but I think the best you can do as far as maintainability goes is to try to use only functions that are supported properly on at least a few major browsers.
That's a developmental strategy, not a support strategy. It's quite orthogonal to the subject at hand.
It's directly related to you support philosophy.
Do you plan to support the standard, or do you plan to support specfic pieces of software no matter how hopelessly broken they are?
I suggest the latter is asking for trouble.
Instead of modifying your software to accomodate other's broken software, point user to software that works. Use only features that have multiple working implementations on whatever platforms you're interested in.
Instead of coding for specfic browsers, write valid code!
That was the whole intent of the web in the first place.
I always find it ridiculous when a website talks about what browsers it "supports." Websites should not be browser-specfic.
Also: USE AS FEW FEATURES AS POSSIBLE.
I can't count how many times I've seen things that could have been done in simple HTML, done instead in flash, java, javascript, activex, etc. The more different technologies you use, the more you'll get screwed up by subtle glitches in their implementation.
In short, pick a handful of good technologies and implement them properly. Support users by pointing them to software that is not broken.
Besides the fact that you won't have a clue what you're doing since you'll never have learned anything, if you don't have any desire to do it in the first place, why are you in the field?
MONEY
I met my share of students who had no real passion for their major in college. They were simply there because they figured once they got their degree, they could rake in the cash.
Ok, for a criminal example, say the cops smash into your house and arrest you for murder. You go to trial spending hundreds of thousands to prove you are innocent. You are trying to tell me you are now bankrupt just because some cop screwed up the evidence?
Yup. That's how it works.
If you're acquitted you don't get your money back.
The only way you might get your money back would be if you filed a seperate civil suit and were able to prove some sort of gross misconduct....and you are not provided with even a shitty lawyer for civil suits if you can't afford one, so you better have some money left over.
Wiki though should never be used as the review process isn't up to scholastic standards. this is especially true for historians when studying such things as the Holocaust.
Something I really wish Wikipedia would do is provide a stable archive of their pages so one could cite them without fear that they might change in the future.
I wouldn't consider Wikipedia as a sole souce of information for an academic paper, but when the information there can be confirmed by other sources I see it as a very good place to point to. Being no longer a student myself, I lack easy access to the wonderful libraries that I formerly had. Wikipedia is availible to people at no cost, anywhere they can manage to get internet access.
I like that. I feel it helps people, and narrows the gap between the haves and the have nots.
Sometimes I wonder how people ever got anything done before the internet:) I learn new things every day.
Encyclopaedias have an important role, but they are background sources, not academic sources.
I really question whether this will continue to be the truth. Electronic encyclopedias aren't subject to the same space crunch as their print counterparts. There's no obvious reason why they couldn't continue to expand until they have oodles of depth.
What happens for example, if a reseacher decides to "publish" his work in a wiki article? Seems to me that it automatically becomes an academic source. It might no longer be accurate to call it an encyclopedia, but we may be stuck with no more accurate term to use.
I think the Wikipedia needs some structural reform, and it will come in due time as it accumulates more and more information.
I think you could write a paper about any aspect of Russian culture or history and use the phrase "command economy" without having to cite it, actually; anyone who knows anything about the subject will know what you're talking about.
But since the hypothetical paper was really about a violinist and not economics, it's not a completely absurd idea to provide a reference.
Yes, encyclopedias exist as a source of information -- but not as the be-all and end-all of research.
Right...exactly. They ARE a source of information. As such, they are fair game for citation. Sometimes they don't contain sufficient depth for the partiular situation but other times they do. Your viewpoint completely ignores all the cases where they do.
[shrug] I think I got exactly the right idea out of it, in that ever since then, I've known how to write a good research paper, whereas when I was an undergrad, it was immediately obvious that many of my classmates didn't.
And you seem to think this is because they used encyclopedias. I would suggest that this proves that you don't have the right idea. IMO, the right idea would be that they needed to delve deeper into the issue. The idea that providing a summary of a single encyclopedia article was no longer sufficient depth for the courses they were involed in.
It's simply not realistic to believe that there's no possible situation for an encyclopedia to be cited in an academic paper. Hell, what if your subject IS encyclopedias?
Uhh it works that way now. If you sue me and lose, I have the right to ask the court to force you to play my legal expenses. That's only fair, otherwise you'll have people suing each other with the sole intent of bankrupting them.
You seem completely unware of the disctinction between criminal and civil litigation.
my American History teacher in high school, did the class an enormous favor with his source policy, which seemed Draconian at the time: "If you cite an encyclopedia article in your paper, no matter how good the rest of the paper is, you get an F on the assignment." An encylopedia -- any encyclopedia -- is a place to start looking for information, but unless you're just looking up something quickly to satisfy your own curiosity, it's never a place to finish.
That policy is ridiculus. First off, when you're writing about a complex subject, sometimes you need to mention something in passing but don't need to go into detail.
Say you're writing a paper about the life of a famous russian violinist and you just happen to use the phrase "command economy". It would be abosultely stupid to go on and cite five sources of a little tidbit of information that is peripheral to your main subject.
Scond, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with using an encyclopedia as a source of information. THAT'S WHY THEY EXIST. If you need more information or corroboration, then by all means go get it, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the concept of encyclopedias. They serve their purpose.
Your teacher obviously wanted to teach his students valuable research skills. He wanted them to use non-encyclopedia sources becuase it's useful to know how to find information from other sources.
Unfortuantely, his policy gave you the wrong idea... and that's what's really wrong with it.
Why shouldn't criminals have to pay for the consequences of their actions?
Who's arguing that they shouldn't?
It's certainly not me.
If they had to pay for these things, including the costs of convicting them
This is really a seperate issue. If it costs $20,000 to convict someone for stealing a $1 candy bar they simply should not be charged with a theft in the amount of $20,001.
Anyways, if you're going to make me pay the gov't for the cost of prosecuting me if they win, why shouldn't the gov't have to pay for my costs of defense if I win?
Imagine how that would have worked out with the OJ trial?
maybe the justice system wouldn't be so massively underfunded.
They'd have plenty of money if they weren't so busy throwing non-violent offenders in jail, setting mandatory minimum sentencing, etc.
Of course, the whole idea that law enfocement shouldn't cost society money is fucked in itself. It reminds me of something I read while looking at the propiska system in Moscow, it was along the lines of:
"We give you a badge and a gun, don't expect us to pay you, use it to make your own money."
Making crime and punishment cash-flow positive is a recipe for a seriously corrupt system.
50 man days to 1. undo what little damage he did, and 2. make damn sure he didn't do anything more serious and insidious?
I'd call that about right.
Based on that reasoning why not 500 man days? 5,000?
"Damages" should be calculated based on actual damages. If not, there's really no limit to how much damage they can claim.
It's not that I necessarily believe that the number 50 is unreasonable, it's that the argument you're using to support it certainly is.
Imagine if this was applied to someone who stole a $1 candy bar: Yes, it only took $1 to replace the candy bar, but we had to spend $10,000 to inventory the whole store.
Just to play devil's advocate, Apple's OS is largely bug-free and secure, and yet quite a few people pay cash money for an upgrade every year or so. This is presumably because each new release of OSX has enough cool features to give it some appeal, even without a bunch of critical security updates.
Of course this just shows that neither company sells JUST an OS.
I think the Linux community has a better name for this, a distribution. You get a whole bunch of programs and an OS. They are bundled together, but don't fundamentally need to be, it's just more convenient for the user.
Of course, I see it as VERY possible for the whole upgrade treadmill to disappear, just look at systems like portage, apt, etc. They provide two things:
A way to get new software.
A way to update the software you already have
I believe that this is really the key. Right now you can't do the latter without going through Microsoft. If Microsoft lost that control, they could loose sales very quickly.
Imagine if a project was successful that replaced the Windows OS with a clone with perfectly identical APIs. They'd be in big trouble. Users could take everything they have and KEEP it as they moved forward.
Remember your first Nintendo "Mario's"? Plug em in n out, not enough gold on the contacts, but the chips still play if you blow on the contacts.How many disk games have worn out since?
Actually it's usually the connector that wears out. It you replace it, you probably won't have to blow anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
In the first case, full disclosure means that everyone will know it, which will allow all the black hats to exploit the public with it before the company has a chance to fix it and deploy (or at least try) the fix.
BZZZZT! WRONG!
The only people going to be exploited in this case are the people who CONTINUE TO USE THE SERVICE DESPITE PUBLIC KNOWLEDGE THAT IT IS INSECURE.
Imagine there's a server out there with all your financial infomation on it. If someone gets access to it you'll be ruined. Do you really want to just *hope* that no one takes advantage of the vunerability, OR would you rather they just unplug that box until the fix is ready in 24 hours.
Full disclosure puts the pressure where it belongs (better fix it before I switch to a different platform) and allows users to make an informed decision about what software to use.
I think that the time for sender-postage-paid email has come. It's the only solution that has any significant chance of really killing SPAM.
Yeah, 'cause nobody ever gets junk snail mail!
This idea's been around for a long time and it's just silly. If someone has to jump through hoops to send me email, I would rather they do something sensible, like get their public key signed by someone I trust rather than just proving the have access to five cents.
There are other major problems as well. Like what is I want to send out an anonymous email containing evidence of Ashcroft himself torturing "terror suspects". It's REALLY easy to trace money and the evidence is kept around for a long time.
You're just demonstrating your complete ignorance of US Patent law here. Patents are regularly challenged in a court of law and before a judge with the input of expert witnesses .
...and as I said before, the shit is freakin obvious. The problem here isn't prior art, because you shouldn't have to search for prior art, you should be able to recognize that this is a trivial merger of two already existing technologies. Even if there was no prior art directly implementing the claims of the patent, it should have been immediately thrown out.
You're just demonstrating your lack of reading comprenhension.
Obviously patents get challenged in court.
My point is that patents are considered valid until they are challenged in court and thrown out.
They often lose. People prosecuting a patent that would not withstand this level of scrutiny typically drop their requests for royalties when push comes to shove
Of course, you need something more substantive, my loud friend
How about this:
WE'RE NOT IN A COURT ROOM. I'M BITCHING ON THE INTERNET ABOUT THE FLAWS IN THE SYSTEM ITSELF, NOT SUGGESTING WAYS TO WORK WITHIN THE FLAWED SYSTEM.
How about this, try repling to the points I actually made instead of bragging about being an "expert" witness. The point is that the people wanting to place a restraint on everyone else in the country should have to be the ones paying your fee, not the people who want to continue to do what they were doing before some jerk patented an obvious idea.
Replying to two posts at once:
Turning off the car will lock the steering, and then you'll really be screwed. Instead, just shift to neutral and let the thing bounce off the rev limiter until you're stopped.
This is why you don't turn the iginition all the way off, you leave it in "accessory".
Not every car has a rev limiter, but I have yet to see a car where you can't turn the ignition off without locking the wheel.
Well, if not lock the steering, it'll at least turn off the power steering pump -- and the hydraulic brakes, for that matter
First off, the HYDRAULIC portion of the brakes will still work. You probably mean the vacuum assist. Second, both the power steering and power braking should continue to work to some degree so long as your engine continues to rotate at a moderate speed. (Don't put it in neutral.)
AMD has always had more bugs, and some for more serious then the intel one that sparked enough consumer backlash (out of panic) to have a recall.
I have a hard time believing this is true.
I might believe that AMD usually has more bugs, or has more bugs cumulatively, but the number of bugs, being a RANDOM varible, is quite unlikely to be so well behaved that the number of Intel bugs has NEVER exceeded the number of AMD bugs. I would like to see a source for your statement.
Most patented material is at least somewhat obvious to a specialist in the field, particularly after the fact. That's why people patent things in the first place.
The reason patents were created is to protect investments made in groundbreaking R&D.
The criterion according to the USPTO
The USPTO is worthless. They are simply a registry of "I claim to have invented this on this date."
The problem is that they claim to adequately research patent applications, and therefore those that are accepted are presumed to be valid.
It is retarded to believe that a single gov't agency understands every technology on the planet well enough to decide if a patent is novel.
Patents should be changed so that, like copyright, the evidence is argued in a court of law with expert witnesses. The presumption that an orgainzation that refers to patent applicants as its "customers" and time and time again approves nonsense patents (with no consequences to itself) is qualified to decide what is a valid patent is nonsense.
Perhaps its more the case that a couple of dot com kiddies are trying ride the actual technological advances made half a decade earlier.
Perhaps it's more the case that this shit is freakin obvious.
If your idea is taking something that was already invented and adding the word "wireless" in front of it, that's not any significant innovation. People who file patents like this should go to jail for fraud. It's absuing the system, plain and simple.
This argument seems to be a repeated theme. It's important to remember that:
Imagaine a hypothetical company that makes AIDS treatment drugs. They're raking it in with no end in sight. Suddenly, one of their top scientists develops a cure for AIDS. It was a one in a million shot, and they're pretty sure no one else is going to come up with it. They do the math and they figure out that they can make more money by treating the disease than by curing it, so they burn all they research and remind everyone of their sacred NDA's.
This is just one example of how our current system is completely fucked. It simply does not put the costs and benefits in the proper places.
It only takes the tiniest amount of study to understand that, without patents, the pharmaceutic industry would cease to exist.
It takes only the tiniest amount of common sense to realize that without patents, medical research itself would still exist, just like it was around before patents existed. (Your argument that the industry would cease to exist is also fallacious. Look at all the drugs you can buy that AREN'T covered by patents.)
Bzzzt. Straw man. S/he never claimed it was 100% anything.
Actually they did. Try reading posts before making such silly comments.
Here's the direct quote: "Wine tasting IS SNAKE OIL; 100% so."
Bad move. Claiming that wine tasting is 100% snake oil, makes it pretty easily to DISPROVE your claim. So long as enough "wine snobs" agree on even the most basic question, then you are proven wrong. Personally, I'm pretty sure I can tell the difference between Port and Sherry and I suspect that I'm far from alone :)
...please don't tell me you smell the cork...
Some could then go on to become "ultra fine food" snobs...which the rest of us can laugh at...just like any of us do with "wine snobs".
One has to wonder what it is you have against those of us who like wine. I hate to break it to you but there ARE good wines and bad wines, good movies and bad movies, good coffee and bad coffee, etc. People typically don't agree on their favorites, as their tastes are somewhat different, but most people would rather have fresh-ground coffee than Folger's crystals.
Your opinions seem to reflect those of someone with a lot of preconceived notions about people who drink wine, but little knowedge on the subject of wine itself. Personally, I only like certain types of wines, but I'm not crass enough to imply that people who like other types (or don't like wine at all) are idiots.
Honestly, the whole wine tasting industry is mostly snake oil anyway. I can't find the link, but sone researchers did a "pepsi challenge" type of test with a group of experienced wine tasters. The result? No two wine tasters reported the same taste, body, or whatever from the same wines. Their repsonses were, in fact, wildly dissimilar.
This doesn't mean it's snake oil, it means that different people have different tastes.
Consider an analogy to movies. Not every review gives every movie that same rating, but that certainly doesn't mean there aren't movies that are considered great by the vast majority and those that are considered terrible.
I took wines in college and we did a really interesting test during one of the first lectures: we passed around glasses of sugar water of varying concentrations, went through them in order of concentration, and had members of the class raise their hand once they got to a concentration they considered "sweet". The range between the high and low end was very suprising.
Just like movies, you should find a reviewer who's tastes align with yours.
Bring back the good old days, when wine had the same social status as lager, thats what I say!
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. As far as I see table wine has the same status as your typical beer. Fine wines though, are just that. They cost more to make and are much more rare than a can of Bud. They will ALWAYS have higher social status because of this.
That's a crazy idea. Here's a fact that will MAKE you crazy: neither the latest versions of IE nor Firefox render valid code correctly.
Nobody's perfect, sure.
This is why I say to limit the functions you use.
There are always going to be some functions that aren't supported properly in the various mainstream browsers.
I'm not suggesting this is easy, but I think the best you can do as far as maintainability goes is to try to use only functions that are supported properly on at least a few major browsers.
That's a developmental strategy, not a support strategy. It's quite orthogonal to the subject at hand.
It's directly related to you support philosophy.
Do you plan to support the standard, or do you plan to support specfic pieces of software no matter how hopelessly broken they are?
I suggest the latter is asking for trouble.
Instead of modifying your software to accomodate other's broken software, point user to software that works. Use only features that have multiple working implementations on whatever platforms you're interested in.
Here's a crazy idea:
Instead of coding for specfic browsers, write valid code!
That was the whole intent of the web in the first place.
I always find it ridiculous when a website talks about what browsers it "supports." Websites should not be browser-specfic.
Also:
USE AS FEW FEATURES AS POSSIBLE.
I can't count how many times I've seen things that could have been done in simple HTML, done instead in flash, java, javascript, activex, etc. The more different technologies you use, the more you'll get screwed up by subtle glitches in their implementation.
In short, pick a handful of good technologies and implement them properly. Support users by pointing them to software that is not broken.
Besides the fact that you won't have a clue what you're doing since you'll never have learned anything, if you don't have any desire to do it in the first place, why are you in the field?
MONEY
I met my share of students who had no real passion for their major in college. They were simply there because they figured once they got their degree, they could rake in the cash.
Ok, for a criminal example, say the cops smash into your house and arrest you for murder. You go to trial spending hundreds of thousands to prove you are innocent. You are trying to tell me you are now bankrupt just because some cop screwed up the evidence?
...and you are not provided with even a shitty lawyer for civil suits if you can't afford one, so you better have some money left over.
Yup. That's how it works.
If you're acquitted you don't get your money back.
The only way you might get your money back would be if you filed a seperate civil suit and were able to prove some sort of gross misconduct.
Wiki though should never be used as the review process isn't up to scholastic standards. this is especially true for historians when studying such things as the Holocaust.
:) I learn new things every day.
Something I really wish Wikipedia would do is provide a stable archive of their pages so one could cite them without fear that they might change in the future.
I wouldn't consider Wikipedia as a sole souce of information for an academic paper, but when the information there can be confirmed by other sources I see it as a very good place to point to. Being no longer a student myself, I lack easy access to the wonderful libraries that I formerly had. Wikipedia is availible to people at no cost, anywhere they can manage to get internet access.
I like that. I feel it helps people, and narrows the gap between the haves and the have nots.
Sometimes I wonder how people ever got anything done before the internet
Encyclopaedias have an important role, but they are background sources, not academic sources.
I really question whether this will continue to be the truth. Electronic encyclopedias aren't subject to the same space crunch as their print counterparts. There's no obvious reason why they couldn't continue to expand until they have oodles of depth.
What happens for example, if a reseacher decides to "publish" his work in a wiki article? Seems to me that it automatically becomes an academic source. It might no longer be accurate to call it an encyclopedia, but we may be stuck with no more accurate term to use.
I think the Wikipedia needs some structural reform, and it will come in due time as it accumulates more and more information.
I think you could write a paper about any aspect of Russian culture or history and use the phrase "command economy" without having to cite it, actually; anyone who knows anything about the subject will know what you're talking about.
But since the hypothetical paper was really about a violinist and not economics, it's not a completely absurd idea to provide a reference.
Yes, encyclopedias exist as a source of information -- but not as the be-all and end-all of research.
Right...exactly. They ARE a source of information. As such, they are fair game for citation. Sometimes they don't contain sufficient depth for the partiular situation but other times they do. Your viewpoint completely ignores all the cases where they do.
[shrug] I think I got exactly the right idea out of it, in that ever since then, I've known how to write a good research paper, whereas when I was an undergrad, it was immediately obvious that many of my classmates didn't.
And you seem to think this is because they used encyclopedias. I would suggest that this proves that you don't have the right idea. IMO, the right idea would be that they needed to delve deeper into the issue. The idea that providing a summary of a single encyclopedia article was no longer sufficient depth for the courses they were involed in.
It's simply not realistic to believe that there's no possible situation for an encyclopedia to be cited in an academic paper. Hell, what if your subject IS encyclopedias?
Uhh it works that way now. If you sue me and lose, I have the right to ask the court to force you to play my legal expenses. That's only fair, otherwise you'll have people suing each other with the sole intent of bankrupting them.
You seem completely unware of the disctinction between criminal and civil litigation.
my American History teacher in high school, did the class an enormous favor with his source policy, which seemed Draconian at the time: "If you cite an encyclopedia article in your paper, no matter how good the rest of the paper is, you get an F on the assignment." An encylopedia -- any encyclopedia -- is a place to start looking for information, but unless you're just looking up something quickly to satisfy your own curiosity, it's never a place to finish.
That policy is ridiculus. First off, when you're writing about a complex subject, sometimes you need to mention something in passing but don't need to go into detail.
Say you're writing a paper about the life of a famous russian violinist and you just happen to use the phrase "command economy". It would be abosultely stupid to go on and cite five sources of a little tidbit of information that is peripheral to your main subject.
Scond, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with using an encyclopedia as a source of information. THAT'S WHY THEY EXIST. If you need more information or corroboration, then by all means go get it, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the concept of encyclopedias. They serve their purpose.
Your teacher obviously wanted to teach his students valuable research skills. He wanted them to use non-encyclopedia sources becuase it's useful to know how to find information from other sources.
Unfortuantely, his policy gave you the wrong idea... and that's what's really wrong with it.
Why shouldn't criminals have to pay for the consequences of their actions?
Who's arguing that they shouldn't?
It's certainly not me.
If they had to pay for these things, including the costs of convicting them
This is really a seperate issue. If it costs $20,000 to convict someone for stealing a $1 candy bar they simply should not be charged with a theft in the amount of $20,001.
Anyways, if you're going to make me pay the gov't for the cost of prosecuting me if they win, why shouldn't the gov't have to pay for my costs of defense if I win?
Imagine how that would have worked out with the OJ trial?
maybe the justice system wouldn't be so massively underfunded.
They'd have plenty of money if they weren't so busy throwing non-violent offenders in jail, setting mandatory minimum sentencing, etc.
Of course, the whole idea that law enfocement shouldn't cost society money is fucked in itself. It reminds me of something I read while looking at the propiska system in Moscow, it was along the lines of:
"We give you a badge and a gun, don't expect us to pay you, use it to make your own money."
Making crime and punishment cash-flow positive is a recipe for a seriously corrupt system.
It's not just the time to restore the account. They had to search the system to find out how it happened and who did it. That can take a lot of time.
And they had to inventory the whole store to make sure nothing else was missing and no bombs were planted when that $1 candy bar was stolen.
The point is, there needs to be a seperation between what is considered actual damages of a crime and what is being spent on investigation.
50 man days to
1. undo what little damage he did, and
2. make damn sure he didn't do anything more serious and insidious?
I'd call that about right.
Based on that reasoning why not 500 man days? 5,000?
"Damages" should be calculated based on actual damages. If not, there's really no limit to how much damage they can claim.
It's not that I necessarily believe that the number 50 is unreasonable, it's that the argument you're using to support it certainly is.
Imagine if this was applied to someone who stole a $1 candy bar: Yes, it only took $1 to replace the candy bar, but we had to spend $10,000 to inventory the whole store.
Of course this just shows that neither company sells JUST an OS.
I think the Linux community has a better name for this, a distribution. You get a whole bunch of programs and an OS. They are bundled together, but don't fundamentally need to be, it's just more convenient for the user.
Of course, I see it as VERY possible for the whole upgrade treadmill to disappear, just look at systems like portage, apt, etc. They provide two things:
I believe that this is really the key. Right now you can't do the latter without going through Microsoft. If Microsoft lost that control, they could loose sales very quickly.
Imagine if a project was successful that replaced the Windows OS with a clone with perfectly identical APIs. They'd be in big trouble. Users could take everything they have and KEEP it as they moved forward.
Remember your first Nintendo "Mario's"? Plug em in n out, not enough gold on the contacts, but the chips still play if you blow on the contacts.How many disk games have worn out since?
Actually it's usually the connector that wears out. It you replace it, you probably won't have to blow anymore.